My Private War (1990)

In the late 1980s, two documentary filmmakers discover six German men, aged 60s and 70s, who were soldiers in the German invasion of the USSR in 1942. Each carried an 8mm camera into battle and still possesses the resulting film. "Mein Krieg" weaves together interviews with these men – some now apologetic, others philosophical, and some defiant – alongside the footage they captured. The film follows a chronological order: basic training, the journey east by train, aerial views of war-torn Warsaw, scenes of Belarusian peasants, the downing of a Russian plane, winter landscapes, a Black Sea holiday, mud, impassable roads, death, destruction, and retreat. "Home, that was the front," one of them reflects.